Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Fallen Leaves
2023 · Aki Kaurismäki · Fallen Leaves on Sightlines
A radio is on in a small Helsinki kitchen, reporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Everything else in the room belongs to some earlier decade: a rotary phone, jukebox reds and greens, a coat on a hook. Nobody in the frame can do one thing about what the radio is saying. So nobody does anything. The bulletin ends. The room stays exactly as it was.
That shot is the film. It is also why a few of Gilles Deleuze's ideas turn out to be unusually good company here, because the usual praise for Fallen Leaves — deadpan, charming, humane — never quite explains why it lands so hard. Deleuze split cinema in two. In the first half, which he called the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts on it and the action changes the situation. That circuit powers almost every film you have loved. In the second half, the time-image, the circuit snaps. The person still perceives perfectly well. They simply have no action available. They look, they wait, they endure, and time quits being the measure of movement and becomes the thing you are watching.
Kaurismäki's radio is the cleanest instrument for this in recent cinema. Deleuze distinguishes two kinds of offscreen. There is the relative kind: the next room, the street past the window, somewhere the camera could reach by panning. And there is the absolute out-of-field, a beyond that isn't located anywhere and that no camera move can arrive at. The war in this film is the second kind. It never becomes a place. It gets no establishing shot, no map, no footage. It enters as sound only, into a frame with nowhere to go.
Which is why the frames are built the way they are. Timo Salminen shot this, as he shot nearly everything Kaurismäki made for forty years, and he died in December 2022, which puts it among the last of them. The compositions are frontal, usually static, tightly bounded — interiors dressed as color-blocked stage sets, figures arranged with the stillness of a painted still life, doorways framing people inside the frame the way Fassbinder framed his outcasts in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Deleuze would call this a closed set: a frame treated as a system, saturated and sealed. The tighter the seal, the louder the absolute outside. Kaurismäki shot on 35mm not out of nostalgia but because the stock is what gives him his blocks of red and green and blue against dark surrounds — colour that doesn't decorate the feeling, it soaks it up, which is Deleuze's colour-image working exactly as advertised.
Inside that sealed frame, two people underplay to the edge of immobility. This is Bresson's method, taken whole from Pickpocket: flat delivery, neutral faces, the interior life displaced onto hands and objects. Deleuze's word for the close-up is the affection-image, a feeling that registers and then has nowhere to discharge, and the finest version of it is the qualisign — an immobile reflecting face expressing a single held quality. Alma Pöysti's Ansa is a masterclass. Nothing crosses that face and everything is on it. When she names a stray dog Chaplin, the whole arc of her loneliness is in four syllables and no expression at all.
Their bodies do the rest. The low frontal camera comes straight from Tokyo Story, and so does the film's habit of cutting away to an empty space or an object between lines. Ozu's pillow shot. Deleuze called these stretches temps mort, dead time: passages where nothing advances the plot and the everyday is simply held. Kaurismäki times comedy out of them. The beat of silence before a laconic line, the cut that lands a moment later than you expect — at 81 minutes, with Bresson's elliptical compression from Diary of a Country Priest behind it, every held moment is chosen rather than indulged. Deleuze also has a name for what a posture can carry: the gest, an attitude that exposes a social relation rather than a private feeling. Ansa stocking shelves, checking dates, then fired for taking home food the store was going to throw out. That isn't characterisation. It is a relation, legible in a body.
And the karaoke bar, the jukebox, the Maustetytöt performance. These are pure sound situations in Deleuze's sense, where all anyone can do is listen. The songs say what Ansa and Holappa will not, and this isn't a shortcut around dialogue; it's the architecture. They are listeners by construction.
Here is the argument. On paper the plot is old movement-image machinery — the comedy of obstacles, boy meets girl, number lost, address misremembered, an accident delaying the reunion. Screwball and melodrama ran on exactly these parts. Kaurismäki keeps the skeleton and drains the action out of it. Not one obstacle is something a person can act against. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. Holappa loses the number and the answer isn't a chase, it's a drink. His drinking, which keeps costing him work, traces what Deleuze called a line of slope — naturalism's downward pull toward exhaustion, appetite winning. The film builds that slope with real conviction and then refuses to walk it to the bottom, which is the Le Jour se lève inheritance turned inside out: Carné and Prévert's studio-lit proletarian romance was doomed by design, and Prévert also wrote the lyric this film is named after. Kaurismäki keeps the studio light and the tenderness and declines the fatalism.
There is politics in that refusal, and it isn't in any speech. Kaurismäki framed this as a fourth panel of his 1980s proletarian trilogy, a working-class film with no working class visible in it as a class — zero-hours work, a fired shelf-stocker, a sandblaster, no union, no crowd. Deleuze's phrase for modern political cinema was that the people are missing: the political can no longer pass through a collective ready to be represented, so a filmmaker has to invent one image at a time. Two people and a dog is what's left, and Kaurismäki treats them as though they were a nation.
So: what did this do to film? It proved that the time-image doesn't have to be forbidding. The canon Deleuze built it from is austere and often difficult. Kaurismäki assembles a warm, funny, unembarrassed romance from the same grammar — faces that only look, bodies that only hold, dead time, an outside nobody can reach — and gets it done in 81 minutes. He put the whole lineage on screen while he was at it: a cinema lobby hung with posters of the directors he owes, Jarmusch's zombies playing on the screen his lovers watch, a dog named after the tramp of City Lights, whose working-poor pathos is the model for this film's ending. Cinema as refuge, and cinema as a declared debt.
Deleuze's last claim in Cinema 2 was that the link between people and the world had broken, and that film's job now was to give us reasons to believe in this world again. Not another world. This one. That is a very large thing to ask of a Finnish comedy in which almost nobody speaks.
Watch it once more for the silences, and ask whether the deadpan is armour or manners. I think it is manners: these two withhold because a display would be an imposition. See if the film agrees with me.
Concepts in play
- out-of-field-absolute — The radio bulletins of Russia's invasion of Ukraine — the one insistently contemporary technology in an otherwise mid-century room; the war arrives only as sound and is never given a location the camera could reach.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The comedy-of-obstacles plot (lost phone number, misremembered address, an accident delaying the reunion) runs classical action machinery while every obstacle is one nobody can act against; Holappa answers the lost number with a drink.
- icon of quality (qualisign) — Bressonian 'model' performance taken from Pickpocket: Pöysti and Vatanen underplay to near-immobility with flat delivery and withheld expression, so a glance, a half-smile or the naming of the dog Chaplin carries everything.
- the closed set (cadre) — Salminen's frontal, static, carefully bounded compositions; interiors dressed as color-blocked stage sets with pictorial stillness; the frame-within-frame doorway staging inherited from Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.
- affective colour — 35mm capture chosen for how the stock renders blocks of saturated red, green and blue against muted or dark surrounds, with theatrical lighting isolating faces and objects.
- temps mort — The Ozu-derived pillow-shot cutaways to empty spaces and objects that pace the scenes between dialogue, the beat of silence before a laconic line, and the cut that arrives a moment later than expected.
- attitudes & postures — Characters staged with formal restraint, facing forward in balanced tableaux, shot with the frontal low camera taken from Tokyo Story; warmth emerges through posture and small movement rather than expression.
- the gest — Ansa the supermarket shelf-stocker, checking expiry dates and then fired for taking home expired food the store would have discarded — a work posture that exposes the social relation it belongs to.
- pure optical & sound situations — The karaoke bar, the jukebox selections and the Maustetytöt performance: diegetic songs carry the feeling the characters will not articulate, and the characters can only listen.
- entropy / degradation — Holappa's alcoholism, which keeps costing him work — naturalism's irreversible downward pull, built with conviction and then declined by the film's gently hopeful, Chaplinesque close.
- people-are-missing — Kaurismäki's framing of the film as a fourth entry to the 1980s Proletariat trilogy: a working-class film of zero-hours precarity with no working class present as a collective, only two isolated people and a stray dog.